Based Founders Fellowship Africa 🚀 UTU 🟡 + 🟦 Base — BFF

Moves reshaping African Web3: An elite Pan-African founder fellowship; UTU’s trust infrastructure comes to Base.

UTU is announcing the first Based Founders Fellowship Africa, addressing critical barriers to scale for the African web3 ecosystem through support to elite founders and creators. Hosted by UTU, Sponsored by Base. 🟡+🟦 BFF

UTU is also announcing our upcoming deployment of UTU’s trust infrastructure on Base, making Web3 safe for everyone.

1: Based Founders Fellowship (BFF) — Africa 🌍

UTU is thrilled to work with Base and BFF’s VC Partners Lava, Electric Capital, 1confimation, and a16zcrypto to launch the Based Founders Fellowship Africa. This program offers 26 top African Founders and Creators a transformational 10-day fellowship in Kenya (October 22–31). It’s a free program, focused on tackling the specific barriers blocking each company’s 10X growth.

Meet our incredible first cohort of Based Founders and Creators:

🇰🇪Paul Gachora — Project Mocha — Turning Coffee Consumers into Coffee investors

🇳🇬Chizaram Ucheaga — Timon Financials Inc — Your financial passport for global travel

🇺🇸 Adamu Umaru — Plu — Plu is a blockchain-powered financial platform that enables Africans to spend, save, and — soon — access credit globally through debit and credit cards seamlessly connected to stablecoins.

🇳🇬Uthman YUSSUFF — Payrit — A FIAT to FIAT instant crossborder payment service for travellers powered by stablecoins.

🇰🇪Chris Oketch — Minisend — An offramp miniapp on the baseapp & Farcaster

🇺🇸James Okuzor — Storipod — Storipod is a social storytelling platform where readers discover, share, and support great stories through an engaging, creator-driven experience.

🇧🇼Humphrey Mwamba — mystocks.africa — Financial tokenization platform for africa and the world on BASE.

🇺🇸Elo Mukoro — Cr3dentials — Verification infrastructure for financial institutions

🇬🇭Joshua Adeola — Cryptomomo — Cryptomomo is a digital finance platform that uses stablecoins to make sending, receiving, and cashing out money in Ghana fast, easy, and affordable.

🇰🇪Martin Chege — Sargo — Sargo is the coordination layer for wallet liquidity, solving Africa’s fragmented on/off-ramp problem by unifying buy/sell offers across wallets, chains, and chat apps into a single non-custodial marketplace.

🇳🇬Chiagozie Iwu — Ledig — Ledig is bringing institutional FX to DeFi by building stablecoin to fiat rails and on-chain hedging tools that unlock reliable liquidity across 17+ African currencies.

🇰🇪Radhika Bhachu — Ndovu — Robinhood for Africa

🇬🇭 Paul Kwesi Damalie — Geny Labs,Inc — A voice powered business assistant for skilled service businesses.

🇳🇬Emeka Nwosu — Ribh Finance — Stablecoin-powered B2B payments solution for SMEs in Africa

🇳🇬Daniel Anwuli — Spenda — Crypto Spending app for Africans

🇰🇪Derrick Bundi –Pretium — A payment platform that bridge existing payment rails with blockchain technology.

🇳🇬Florence Isika — Centry — Centry allows users convert crypto to cash at a near instant speed, powering cross border payments in Africa

🇰🇪Eric Michubu — Yiksi — A simple platform that enables users to buy and sell stablecoins.

🇨🇲Tierno Tall — Ejara — Allow users to buy crypto currencies and fractional shares.

🇰🇪James Orengo — Hurupay — The first stablecoin-native banking platform that lets businesses open a true global USD account in minutes — without an EIN, US tax ID, or a physical US address.

🇳🇬Abayomi Semudara — @semudaraabayomi — Product designer and tech content creator known for his “60 Seconds Startup Pitch” series that gives founders one minute to pitch their startups.

🇰🇪Aurelia Mutua — @mwikali_aurelia — Business development and KOL management specialist in Web3 and fintech, co-founder of Decentrix Africa, driving crypto adoption and strategic partnerships across African markets.

🇰🇪Dada Boipelo — @hvrmemoirs — Chief Marketing Officer at Cr3dentials and creative professional specializing in Web3 and NFT marketing, founding member of African Meta Club and former marketing lead at AfrofutureDAO.

🇳🇬Kokocodec — @kokocodes — Ecosystem growth strategist and community manager working with Base blockchain, Saige, and CreatorX, building Web3 communities and hosting spaces.

🇰🇪Wanjiru Mwoka — @CryptoChic56 — Web3 and NFT content creator based in Kenya who demystifies blockchain, NFTs, and crypto for enthusiasts and newcomers.

🇳🇬Qin —  qingthecreator_— Visual StoryTeller, Founder @TheCreative_Hut, Public Speaker, Web3 Content Strategist. Creative Lead at Base West Africa, vibe-coding the future.

We could not be more excited to work with Base to accelerate a cohort of the continent’s most based founders and creators!

To celebrate the creation of Based Founders Fellowship Africa, UTU will:

2: Deploy UTU Protocol on Base 🔵

We will deploy UTU’s Trust Infrastructure on Base, bringing better trust to the whole Base ecosystem, giving Based projects access to a social reputation, reviews, and a trust system driven by users’ personal networks and economic incentives for building trust online.

3: Deploy an UTU Trust Mini App for the Base App 🟨

UTU will also deploy its trust infrastructure into the incredible new Base App (yes, we got early access, it’s very cool), using the Base MiniKit. We love this for its inherently social approach to web 3 that mirrors UTU’s belief in the power of our networks to keep us safe and help us find things we love.

Bringing our technologies together is a dream come true, as UTU and Base work together to make web3 safe for the next billion users.

1: Based Founders Fellowship Africa — Surgical Problem-Solving for Elite Founders and Creators 🎯

Africa’s crypto market is exploding. 1.4 billion people, rapidly expanding digital infrastructure, and founders who build solutions that actually work for real users with real constraints. But scaling from 1,000 to 100,000 users? That’s where most promising projects hit the wall.

African founders have cracked something others are still figuring out: how to build crypto solutions people actually need and use. From remittances to savings groups to supply chain verification, African web3 projects solve immediate problems for users who can’t afford to lose money on experiments.

The scaling challenge: Most promising African web3 projects often plateau around 1,000–5,000 users. Not because the market isn’t there, but because founders hit specific, predictable barriers that require specialized knowledge to overcome.

BFF isn’t a generic accelerator. It’s 10 days of targeted problem-solving designed around each founder’s three biggest blockers to 10X growth.

How it works:

• Pre-program Context: Deep dives into each company’s specific scaling barriers
• Customized mentor matching: Pair founders with mentors who’ve solved their exact challenges
• Targeted sessions: Focus exclusively on the 2–3 issues blocking each founder’s next growth phase. One founder at a time, the collective brainpower, experience, and networks of the entire Base and UTU ecosystems, put in service of your goals.
• Implementation support: Leave with concrete action plans and ongoing mentor relationships and the means to execute on those plans.

The type of blockers we’ll help these founders solve:

• Regulatory navigation across multiple African markets
• Liquidity to settle trades
• Token model design and stress-testing
• Technical infrastructure that breaks under load
• Fundraising strategies, tools, and connections that work for African founders
• User acquisition beyond early adopter communities
• Partnership and customer development with key industry players
• Cross-border payment integration and compliance that keeps you out of jail

The mentor network:

• African founders who’ve scaled past 100K users
• Global VCs with active Africa investment theses
• Technical leaders from successful crypto infrastructure and consumer companies
• Regulatory experts who’ve navigated multi-country expansions
• Business development strategists with proven African market experience
• Ecosystem builders with deep reach into African web3 communities
• Technical partners ready to spin up to solve your product challenges with you

Demo Day: Global VCs are actively hunting for African deals. BFF’s invite only Demo Day will connect proven founders with investors who write checks, not just offer advice.

We are also pleased to introduce Joan Jerop as our BFF Associate. Joan Jerop brings her deep passion for technology, education, and ecosystem growth across Africa. Joan is the Founder of OneDev, an edtech platform that trains developers in Web3 and Artificial Intelligence (AI) while creating meaningful opportunities for them across the globe.

Want to meet the first BFF Africa Cohort? Reach out for an invite to Demo Day!

2: UTU on Base 🟡+🟦 Reclaiming Trust for the Humans

What would BFF be if our technologies didn’t vibe together? So to mark the occasion of the Based Founders Fellowship, UTU will deploy on the Base network. UTU is already on Optimisim but this move brings us to exactly where the action is! Deploying UTU Trust on Base means Base users can interact with UTU directly on Base, including making on-chain endorsements and earning rewards without ever switching networks.

What UTU Provides for Base Users:

• Authentic reviews from your social networks about anything you can find online
• Rewards for helping to build trust online
• Easy access to UTU signals from all networks through the UTU Trust App and UTU Trust Browser Extension, right there on Base
• No bots, spammers, scammers, miscreants, or naredowells in the UTU airwaves 🔉

What UTU Provides for Based Projects:

• Authentic reviews from your users’ social networks via our Trust API that improve conversion
• A fully featured review mechanism to capture your users’ feedback
• Network-based reputation that reduces CAC and increases satisfaction and retention
• Easy integration via our Trust SDK. Full API documentation at docs.utu.io with Base-specific examples and integration guides.

3: UTU Trust Mini App 🟡+🟦 Better Trust for Mass Adoption

The mobile problem: Crypto on mobile means small screens, quick decisions, high stakes. Users get scammed faster on mobile, which kills mainstream adoption before it starts.

UTU will build an UTU Trust Mini App for the new Base app using MiniKit. By integrating UTU’s trust signals directly into your Base app, you’ll get just-in-time trust signals from your entire network about any token, wallet, app, or address that you’re about to interact with, right at that critical moment before you sign, send, or connect.

This sort of social trust integrates perfectly with Base’s inherently social approach to Web3, creating the foundation for mainstream adoption, thus a perfect host for UTU’s Trust Infrastructure. This addresses a critical crypto adoption barrier that affects every user and every founder trying to reach those users.

Mini App solution:

• Native trust signals, from your networks only, within Base app transactions 🛡️
• Social network warnings before users interact with tokens, addresses, etc.
• Quality endorsement system that builds ecosystem-wide confidence
• Zero friction integration — no separate downloads or complex setup
• Network effects that benefit all Base ecosystem participants

The Full Stack for African Web3 Growth 🔥

This collaboration continues UTU’s role as champion for African web3 builders, brings UTU’s tech to one of the hottest L2s on Earth, and will see us integrated into the Base App via an UTU Trust MiniApp.

Most importantly, it recognizes that African founders are building the infrastructure that the rest of the world will eventually adopt. We know, and soon they will too.

Follow @ututrust on X

#BasedFoundersFellowship #BaseBlockchain #AfricaWeb3 #ScaleUp #DigitalTrust

About UTU

UTU is building the trust infrastructure of the internet to help people interact in an easier, safer, and more trustworthy way. At our core, we are a decentralised reputation and reviews tool that rewards users when their content helps others get good outcomes from their online interactions.

Starting with Web3 and DeFi apps, we provide AI-powered curation of trust signals from your network at just the right places and times to help users connect, send, swap, stake, and borrow with confidence.

A suite of trust tools have already been built atop UTU’s Trust Protocol, including the UTU Trust Browser Extension for consumers, and Trust API/SDK for developers. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build atop UTU, to bring better trust to the internet.

UTU is proudly based in Nairobi, Kenya with trust guardians all over. Learn more about UTU on our website, Twitter,Telegram, Discord, LinkedIn,Reddit, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.